Maḥmūd Ghāzān, (born Nov. 5, 1271, Abaskun, Iran—died May 11, 1304) most prominent of the Il-Khans (subordinate khāns) to rule the Mongol dynasty in Iran. Reigning from 1295 to 1304, he is best known for the conversion of his state to Islām and his wars against Egypt.

Maḥmūd Ghāzān receiving the nobles of Khorāsān, detail of an …

Courtesy of the Edinburgh University Library, Scotland

Early life.

Ghāzān’s early childhood was spent largely in the company of his grandfather, the Il-Khan Abagha (1265–82), and he was brought up in the Buddhist faith that both his father and his grandfather professed. Upon his father’s accession to the throne in 1284, Ghāzān was appointed viceroy of the provinces of northeastern Persia, where he resided for the next 10 years and defended the frontier against the Chagatai Mongols of Central Asia and then against his own lieutenant Nawrūz, who had risen in revolt with the Chagatai. Ghāzān’s relations with Arghun’s successor, Gaykhatu (1291–95), were cool; those with Baydū, the latter’s cousin, who dethroned him and usurped the throne, came to open war. After a first encounter, followed by a truce and parley, Ghāzān spent the summer of 1295 in the mountains north of present-day Tehrān, where, on the advice of Nawrūz, with whom he was now reconciled, he declared himself a convert to Islām, and his example was followed by the troops under his command. It was thus at the head of a Muslim force that he resumed the attack against Baydū, who, deserted by his supporters, was captured and executed on the very day of Ghāzān’s entry into the Il-Khanid capital of Tabriz.

Career as Il-Khan.

Ghāzān was formally enthroned on Nov. 3, 1295, and during the first year of his reign he had to cope with a number of revolts against his authority. All were suppressed with the utmost severity—no fewer than five princes of the blood were executed for their complicity. Nawrūz himself, who had helped raise Ghāzān to the throne, was soon to pay with his life for suspected collusion with the Mamlūks. Though now the Muslim head of a Muslim state, Ghāzān took up the hereditary quarrel of his family with these champions of Islām. In 1299–1300 he invaded Syria, defeated the Egyptian army at Homs, and made a triumphal entry into Damascus. Upon his return to Persia early in 1300, however, the country was re-occupied by the Mamlūks. In the autumn of the same year he returned to the attack, but poor weather rendered military operations impossible; the campaign was abandoned before contact could be made with the enemy. For a third campaign he sought an alliance with the Christian West. In a letter to Pope Boniface VIII dated April 12, 1302, he refers to a detailed plan for the invasion of Syria, which he had previously proposed to the princes of Europe and continues:

As for now, we are making our preparations exactly in the manner [laid down in that plan]. You too should prepare your troops, send word to the rulers of the various nations and not fail to keep the rendezvous. Heaven willing, we [i.e.,Ghāzān] shall make the great work [i.e., the war against the Mamlūks] our sole aim.

The campaign to which Ghāzān here alludes was launched in the spring of 1303 without European aid. The Mongols advanced through Syria without meeting serious resistance until they were halted and decisively defeated south of Damascus. A fourth campaign was prevented by an illness that attacked Ghāzān in the autumn of 1303; he recovered for a while but then suffered a relapse and died on May 11, 1304.

Assessment.

Ghāzān’s accomplishments were in no way restricted to his activities on the battlefield. A man of great intellectual curiosity, he was conversant with such diverse topics as natural history, medicine, astronomy, and chemistry and was also an adept in several handicrafts. “No one surpassed him,” says the Byzantine historian Pachymeres, “in making saddles, bridles, spurs, greaves and helmets; he could hammer, stitch and polish, and in such occupations employed the hours of his leisure from war.” Besides his native Mongolian, he is said to have had a knowledge of the Arabic, Persian, Hindi, Kashmiri, Tibetan, Chinese, and Frankish (i.e., probably French) languages.

It was at his suggestion and with his assistance that his vizier Rashīd ad-Dīn composed a celebrated history of the Mongols, which was later expanded to embrace all the peoples of Asia and Europe with which their conquests had brought them in contact. Rashīd ad-Dīn, Ghāzān’s great minister, was perhaps the real author of the fiscal reforms that go under his master’s name and that were designed to protect the sedentary population from the extortions of the nomad aristocracy. These measures, coupled with the adoption of Islām, must have played their part in welding the Mongols and Persians (like the Normans and English) into a single nation, and the Il-Khans might have ended, like the Plantagenets, by becoming a truly national dynasty. In fact, Ghāzān himself, by his ruthless elimination of princely rivals, must have contributed to the extinction of the Il-Khanids, who survived his death by little more than 30 years.

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